Sunday, October 09, 2005

"Before the apex stone is fitted"

"It will take a more definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex stone is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its power is in position to assume leadership among the nations in inaugurating the new order of the ages." - Vice President Henry Wallace, 1934

A brief follow-up to Friday's post. Ever heard of Changing Images of Man?

The report was issued by Stanford Research Institute in 1973, having been commissioned by the US Department of Education five years earlier, and its influence has far outstripped its limited circulation. Its one brush with a general readership came in 1982, when Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press republished it as "one of the 1,000 most important works of modern times," though at this writing even used copies are unavailable at any price through Amazon.

The report found that "Analysis of the nature of contemporary societal problems leads to the conclusion that...the images of man that dominated the last two centuries will be inadequate for the post-industrial era."

Co-editor and principal contributor was Willis H Harman, the late Stanford futurist, professor of Engineering Economic Systems and president of Edgar Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Science (which has been used as cover for some of the CIA's esoterica, such as remote viewing). Harman believed humanity is embarking on a period of "global mind change," and that people could reorder the world "by deliberately changing their internal image of reality."

Harman based his book Global Mind Change upon the Stanford report. In this interview, apparently from the mid-90s, he elaborates on his thoughts on shifting worldviews and our "remarkable point in history":

Whether its psychic phenomena, mystical experiences, communications with the dead...whatever it is, you're implying that reality is different from the way they taught you in school. Sooner or later we're going to say "Well if all of that's so, then our emphases in business and economics have to be different, as well as our emphases in politics, education and healthcare."

How to anticipate and capitalize upon the revolution in worldviews in the dawning post-industrial era is the question Harman's SRI team set to answer. In The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince quote the following passage from Changing Images of Man, perhaps the most important book almost no one has read, which suggests how this may be accomplished:

Of special interest to the Western world is that Freemasonry tradition which played such a significant role in the birth of the United States of America, attested to by the symbolism of the Great Seal.... Thus this has the potentiality of reactivating the American symbols, reinterpreting the work ethic, supporting the basic concepts of a free-enterprise democratic society, and providing new meaning for the technological-industrial thrust.

Symbols and myth are not the accents of a society, they are its engines. Something to think about before they run us over.

I've just been flipping through Global Mind Change, and I have the feeling you're pushing the Freemasonry thing too hard in this case.

About 2/3 of the book consists of a summary of various challenges to scientific materialism -- particularly in medicine and psychology -- and the emergence of a new paradigm largely akin to traditional esoteric teachings. The last 1/3 is a recitation of the overwhelming social, political, and economic problems of the world. And the conclusion is that a shift to a culture based on personal creativity rather than material consumption could be just what the world needs.

All very conventional stuff -- though perhaps less so in 1987 when it was written than now.

The only reference to Freemasonry comes very near the end and seems designed to convince standard-issue Americans that esoteric belief systems aren't something foreign and scary but are as American as apple pie.

Harman's approach certainly looks dated at this point. In the 18 years since he wrote, esoteric belief systems have gotten as entangled on a global level as music or cooking. In a world that pulses to the beats of Brazilian hip-hop and Palestinian salsa and dines on Mexican-Indonesian fusion cooking, Freemasonry looks awfully white bread. My own kids have raised themselves on a spicy mixture of gnosis and cabbala, run through the blender of Japanese anime (don't forget the giant mechs!) and topped with a side order of Phil Dick. But I'd find it very difficult to get worked up over Harman as representing anything actively sinister.

The themes projected by Bush's handlers - militarism, moral superiority, cultural superiority - and all of the iconography that goes with it - the presidential seal as halo, the flag, arm slung around fireman - are all dismissed by the mexican-indonesian fusion crowd. But they clearly play well in Tennessee, Georgia, Texas and lot of other places.

If anyone in power is influenced by the document, you can be sure they are pragmatic enough to interpret in a present-day context. So what if there aren't pyramids with eyes plastered on every street corner? It's the power of images and symbols they will exploit - it doesn't matter what the specific images are as long as they help them exploit the new realities.

as a Master Mason, i can say that the experience is what one makes of it. the abstract hiearchy of life is not at all always obvious. Free and Accepted Masonry gives one an oppurtunity. what is done with that is a matter of personal accord.

for my part, as an active Mason, i see no sign of the dangers represented in a lot of conspiracy theory. Doesn't mean it isn't there; i just haven't/don't see it.

the main reason i joined was for first-hand knowledge of this mysterious body. i'm glad i did. i'm a whole person, and can think clearly. and Masonry was what this country was founded on.

we'd all be better off if we accepted this, and workked for change from an educated insider's persective instead of otherwise.

"Symbols and myth are not the accents of a society, they are its engines. Something to think about before they run us over."

i do tend to ramble, bear with me

We interpret symbols and myth as archetypes, which are fixed points of reference in the brain that evolved for survival reasons, but are out of use now we have more complex forms of communication.

BUT that doesnt mean we have lost our 'instincts', we just find less use for them now. Occasionally they do come into play, in situations of stress or fear, and of sexual attraction, amongst others - think of a woman trying to control her hot flushes when she is attracted to a male.

These have been well understood by governments since Freud brought them to our attention, and advertising for one (as well as the entertainment industry) still relies on these instinctive 'triggers' to sell us stuff - shiny red motorcars, the red dress, cleaning and beauty products, etc.

Perhaps all that was mean by changing the image of man is trying to remove us from the slavish life of archetypes, which in a way would be freeing us from the final constraints of nature, an idea that would probably sit well with the masons. This places our evolution is in their hands which is pretty scary when you see what we've done to all the other species, and our own already.

But then again it could be about reinforcing the chains(which, some would say masons might enjoy too).

you have inspired me awsomely to always seek the truth, thank you for that but I have a question that needs your analysis. In one of your collages you have a peice of the Denver mural. If you have seen that mural and read articles that break this murals coded meaning down, you will have seen a Mayan girl with a stone tablet forteling some type of destruction written on an ancient mayan tablet. Do you think maybe that this recent from STAN (courtesy HAARP and the infamous Dr Eastlund) tragedy was the destruction foretold in the mural?

peice of the Earthlink headline report--(((((Dozens of foreign tourists fled devastated lakeside Mayan towns on foot and by helicopter Sunday as Guatemalan officials said they would abandon communities buried by landslides and declare them mass graveyards.

Villagers who had swarmed over the vast mudslides with shovels and axes digging for hundreds of missing gave up the effort Sunday, five days after Hurricane Stan made landfall on the Gulf of Mexico coast, bringing torrential rains before weakening to a tropical depression.

More than 640 people died and hundreds more were missing across Central America and southern Mexico after a week of rains. In hardest-hit Guatemala, 519 bodies had been recovered and reburied. Some 338 were listed as missing.

"Panabaj will no longer exist," said Mayor Diego Esquina, referring to the Mayan lakeside hamlet in Guatemala covered by a half-mile-wide mudflow as much as 15 to 20 feet deep. "We are asking that it be declared a cemetery. We are tired. We no longer know where to dig."

Many of the missing apparently will simply be declared dead, and the ground they rest in declared hallowed ground. About 160 bodies have been recovered in Panabaj and nearby towns, and most have been buried in mass graves.)))))))))

This quote from the questionsquestions link above seems to sum up the agenda:

The anglo-american elite and their supporters among the old feudal nobility have put a great deal of effort into manipulating environmental issues towards creating a "new paradigm" of social and political thinking more attuned to establishing a global feudal order.

Starroute wrote: "My own kids have raised themselves on a spicy mixture of gnosis and cabbala, run through the blender of Japanese anime (don't forget the giant mechs!) and topped with a side order of Phil Dick."

That's truly an immensely encouraging and terrifying litany. Samuel R. Delaney and "Kung Fu Hustle" are probably both in the spicy stew too.

I'm also fascinated that the Master Mason politely but basically admits that Jeff's remarks are true: "we'd all be better off if we accepted this..."

If I didn't make it clear, my kids aren't getting their gnostic and cabbalistic tendencies direct from the source, but rather filtered through pop culture -- anime, Phil Dick, a bit of the Matrix. I'm not sure yet if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's definitely where their generation is headed.

On the whole, though, I'd come down on the side of *good thing,* if only because it serves as a strong counter to elitism.

The more I try to figure out what is really going on at this Rigorous Intuition site, the more I conclude that elitism is the crucial issue. This whole business is fiendishly complex, but I'd like to make a stab at explaining what I mean by it.

Let's start with Jeff's last post. After bringing up the name of Donald Keys in the comments there, I felt I should at least google him for some outside perspective. To my surprise, virtually everything that came up with his name was anti-New World Order rants from Christian fundamentalists (or in a few cases Orthodox Jews.) The sort of people who believe that Freemasonry is Satanic and that the United Nations is out to set up a one-world government. But even those people didn't seem to know anything about Keys except that he is or was connected with Alice Bailey of the Lucis Trust and therefore must be sinister. (At any rate, none of them mention the telepathic aliens with their headquarters in the Pleiades.)

Now, I wouldn't take the fundamentalists' word for anything, but the problems I'm having is that I don't trust these New World Order types myself. Some of them seem definitely creepy -- like Keys, with his authoritarian tendencies -- while others may be genuinely good people. But even the best of them (like my husband's former correspondent, Guy Murchie) have some quality about them that makes me strongly not want to see the world in their hands.

The best word I can find for that quality is "elitism."

Someone pointed out at Democratic Underground earlier today that the current struggle isn't really left vs. right but up vs. down -- which is an extraordinarily perceptive statement. It's the handful who believe themselves to be our natural rulers against all the rest of us, and the specific ideologies are secondary. That's the core struggle of our time.

Occultism is a particularly awkward situation in the context of that struggle, because in the late 19th and early 20th century it was very strongly associated with elitism. Occultism of that period was based in a belief that there was a hierarchy of spiritual refinement which was reflected in the existing class system. Occultists then tended to be ladies and gentlemen -- while the proletarian rabble were far more given to materialism, with its built-in assumption of radical egalitarianism.

The fear of the modern scientific world and nostalgia for the old class distinctions which characterized many members of the upper classes in the early 20th century (as well as a large number of wannabes) came out of that struggle. Fascism and Naziism owed much of their appeal for certain poets and intellectuals to their implied promise to restore the old spiritual hierarchy of values and fight off a universe in which nothing had meaning because everything was equal.

(And there were others like H.P. Lovecraft, who was not a fascist in any sense of the word, but for whom the scientific universe was nonetheless the ultimate object of horror.)

As the US moved into a wave of populism in the late 30's, that old elite style of occultism with its fascist associations became largely discredited. To survive as an active part of American popular culture, occultism had to find new expressions. In the course of the 40's, occultism in the US largely shed its traditional European Freemasonic/Theosophical baggage and became associated with such alternatives as Zen, American Indian religion, and Jungian archetypes. Other components of popular culture, ranging from science fiction to the various offshoots of Crowley's chaos magic, offered a more rough-hewn, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to the materials of occultism. All of this fed into the Beats and then into the hippie counterculture of the 60s's.

However -- and this is what I think is the crux of the problem -- the old elitists never fully went away. They hung on in the privileged classes of Europe and America. They shed much of their earlier flirtation with fascism, but they retained their belief in their own innate right to rule. And they found places where they could be at home.

Some of them moved into the McCarthyite right, made common cause with the segregationists, or promoted the John Birch Society. But those expressions of elitist attitudes were generally a bit too coarse for the elite itself. Others ensconced themselves in the CIA or other sectors of the federal government.

But others yet were far too high-minded and altruistic to make common cause with the thuggish right. For elitists of that stripe, the United Nations served as a major refuge, particularly in the hyper-rationalistic 1950's and early 60's. There is a certain kind of somewhat academic one-worldish idealism that was very much a part of that era.

And then, after the 60's made occultism fashionable again, many of those same people swarmed in and recolonized that, pulling out the old perennial philosophy stuff and dusting it off for popular consumption.

I could say a lot more on this topic (including recounting the entire history of science fiction, if anyone would hold still for it), but instead I'll make just two observations. One is that this is very literally a battle for heaven -- thatis, for control of the transcendent sources of human consciousness and evolution -- and it is crucially important to return that control to the hands of the human species as a whole.

The other is, once again, that the crucial distinction isn't betwen right and left but up and down. It isn't about the difference between nasty right-wing power-trippers and high-minded altruistic philanthropists. There may be a distinction there, but ultimately it's as fruitless as the distinction between Babylon 5's Vorlons and Shadows. Both sides are self-willed and mindlessly destructive, and both are ultimately impediments to be cleared out of the way of real human development.

looking forward to the sci-fi history: I'm especially interested in who-published-what-when. Genre writers explore 'futuristic' themes and anxieties and sell them to the public at large, who are in turn influenced as an audience. It's a natch that intel/cultys/con-artists are going to tap that circuit in a thousand ways, ways that it pays to get hip to for serious political and creative reasons.

Another element that bears consideration are what are called 'useful idiots' in intelligence parlance. With all due respect to the man ('cause I like him), for example, that the very likely well-intentioned Forrie Ackerman, of Famous Monsters of Filmland fame, had a catalytic role in a couple of weird historical streams (Hubbard, Aquino's Star Wars sequel script).

I don't think he is looking to f-over the world. Another published pulp author, Howard E. Hunt (Black Abductor is one title, a Patty Heast fictional rehearsal years before the 'real') is an example of one who might, tho.

I also appreciate that you bring up the way that fundamentalists' (religious & political) websites often melt down in a mess of factual associations. At this point, I think it might be because they believe in big forces organizing this morass. I don't. Heathen that I am, I am trying to make sense of 4 billion billiard balls (and uncountable historical trails predating them) scattering in a closed space at a frightening rate...

thanks to everyone for keeping up such an interesting, far-ranging conversation.

I hate to say this, but the idea of controlled opposition needs a good dusting off in here. From the posts about people finding 'too many fundamentalists' in their Google searches to 'not trusting these New World Order types,' one needs to understand that the whole game is rigged.

Check out conspiracyarchive.com for the article 'gatekeepers of the so-called left.' It details the links to robber baron money and the current pseudo-leftist falso opposition in this country. It explains why Amy Goodman of Democracy now will never interview William Rodriguez, the WTC survivor who described bombs going off in the basement before the towers fell.

It would be healthy to view all collectives or groups with suspicion, especially when the movement towards creating a 'New world Order' is inherently collectivist in its nature. As Groucho Marx said, "I refuse to be part of any group that would have me as a member." Without the individual, there can be no society.

At the root of it all, there is a collective of unearned wealth and privilege that seeks to justify its existence in a world where it is utterly redundant and useless. Just like the 'war on terra' came along right when the cold Warriors needed to justify their jobs, so too does it provide an excuse for the elites to justify their parasitic existences.

The greatest minds and inventors did not all come from one little elitist segment of society. They came from individuals who used their own God-given brains as they saw fit. This is the idea the elites are using the whole 'order out of chaos' schtick to defeat.

Via Tom from the Nonist, this intriguing quote from David Byrne’s blog:

These writer reporter guys at this dinner party exchange amazing stories — that the U.S.-installed president of Afghanistan is a well known pederast (he likes young boys), for example… but everyone is loathe to put that in print. I was sort of mystified — why not print it? The explanation seemed to be that it’s not unusual over there and it deflects attention from whether or not he’s actually doing anything about pulling that country together, which is deemed a more important issue.

As my friend Stu sings, "The higher that we climb, the more the ladder sways." The development of discriminating awareness is a gradual process sometimes guided by trial and error. There are a couple of questions I ask myself as a means of examining motivations. Are my actions serving to benefit all beings or are they serving my own egoistic needs. Someone asked Ram Dass once if he thought we were in apocolyptic times and what advice he would give if we were. He said if we were or if we weren't his best advice would be to open our hearts and quiet our minds. All this talk of secret societies and global conspiricies can be very compelling and titillating but for my money, sitting on the cushion in silence for an hour every morning feels much more nourishing. Not to do a spiritual bypass; it's important to stay informed but to stay awake and opening to compassion can be transformational personally and ultimately affect the greater good.

In cultures in which access to women is tightly controlled and making a pass at one can get her father, uncles, brothers and male cousins to declare a vendetta on your ass, sex with boys is a fact of life, and is not quite the same as a man in "Christian" America who becomes a scout leader to get access to boys. The classical Greeks were pederasts too, that's where we got the word.

I'm not defending using children for sex, so please don't jump on me. I'm just saying there are cultural differences. I'm more worried about organized pedophilia and child sexual slavery right here at home, and there are plenty of reasons Karzai shouldn't be in power other than doing boys. My guess is those Afghan tribesmen do sheep too when that's all they can get.

The "cultural difference" regarding that pedastry charge would not apply in the Afghani president's situation. He is of an age where he could be married to a woman and actually even have other access to women. So, if he is indeed indulging himself with young males, it should be BIG news, unacceptable to society.

But, there ya go. That is why I do pay attention to the comments regarding ritualized child sex abuse because I know that if it goes on in small time amerikkka, then big time amerikkkans are also doing it.

In Afghanistan, it's not just a matter of access to women. It's been years since I read up on this stuff, so I don't have the details at my fingertips, but in general warrior societies tend to be negative about sex -- or even prolonged association -- with women. They think it makes men unmanly. This was true historically (the shoguns would regularly bitch at the samurai about it) and it remains true today in the few old-fashioned warrior societies that are still around.

Yes, starroute, I will never forget my shock when, as an idealistic Zen student, I happened on an article about what senior monks liked to do to the noobies in Japanese monasteries. I thought dang, you'd think they were priests and altar boys.

Aside from the idea of feminine society being 'weakening' it's also true in traditional societies playing around with a female carries the risk of conception and the attendant stigma of bastardy. Boys never pop up a few years later with a bambino and an order for child support, or, again, the male relatives loaded for bear.

Again, I'm not defending exploitation of children, male or female. It's kind of like when I got into a discussion with people who were down on female circumcision, but when I said I didn't believe in male circumcision either because it is a barbaric mutilation, they got upset because they're used to the latter and the traditional explanation of 'hygiene'. I'm not saying I'd buy the ancient Greeks' idealized justification for man-boy love but truthfully I find it more straightforward than what we have in our society in which grown men, even when they don't actually molest, are emotional pedo- or ephebophiles whose 'mentoring' of young men has a tinge that I find creepy, like the way my high school gym teacher used to look at us as we came out of the shower. Yuck.